A Winning Attitude Key to NFL Success

Glenn Dickey

Published 4:00 am, Friday, September 1, 2000

ATTITUDE IS critical in football. Teams that think they're going to win often win games even when they're not at their best simply because they expect to win. Conversely, there are teams which settle into a losing rut and can't seem to get out of it.

So, I posed this question to Raiders coach Jon Gruden: Does a team win because it develops a winning attitude, or does it take winning at least a divisional title for a team to develop that winning attitude?

"I think it takes a little of both," he said. "You have to have 53 good players, but you also have to have the right chemistry. One bad apple can spoil it for everyone."

OK, so he didn't answer the question. That's because there's no right answer. Sometimes, teams come out of nowhere, changing overnight from doormats to contenders.

The 49ers did it in 1981, winning the Super Bowl on the heels of three years in which they'd won a total of 10 games.

Even more spectacularly, the St. Louis Rams came off a decade in which they were the worst team in the NFL to blitz the league with a high-powered offense and win the Super Bowl last season.

But those teams didn't have the swagger, that feeling that they were going to kick butt every time they went out there. The Rams almost lost the NFC Championship Game to an inferior Tampa Bay team. Maybe this year they'll have that confidence that they're the best, after their Super Bowl season. We'll see.

The 49ers fell back into the abyss in the strike-shortened '82 season, torn apart by internal strife. It wasn't until later that they developed the swagger that made them feared throughout the league.

Because the 49ers' success is more recent, Bay Area fans tend to forget that the Raiders had that same kind of winning attitude in the 1967-83 period, when they were in four Super Bowls and won three. I covered the team at the start of that period and was close to it for several years after, and I can tell you the Raiders of that era expected to win every game. They didn't fall very short of that goal.

The Raiders lost that attitude in a big way. Even when they went 8-2 to start their first season back in Oakland, they were only looking for a soft place to take a dive. They found it, and lost their last six games.

Since he became coach before the 1998 season, Gruden has systematically weeded out the problem players and now believes he has the chemistry to win. But even he can't predict when the Raiders will get the swagger back.

I thought they were getting it back in the first half of their fourth game of last season, in Seattle. They had dominated the Seahawks in that first half in a game that could have put them in the driver's seat in the AFC West if they'd won.

But a poor punt just before halftime gave the Seahawks the field position they needed to push for the touchdown that got them back in the game. The Seahawks won the game, 21-20, and the pattern was set for another frustrating season for the Raiders.

The Raiders seem to have solved the physical problems that plagued them last year, with a new placekicker and punter and younger, tougher safeties who presumably will be able to stop opponents from converting on third-and-long.

Gruden thinks, too, that the Raiders are developing that winning attitude. "Look at the way this team came back last year after some tough losses," he said. He left the field after the season-ending triumph in Kansas City looking as if his team had won the Super Bowl, because he knew that winning a tough game on the road, especially for the Raiders in Kansas City, was an important factor in developing that winning attitude.

He also points to the success of the Tennessee Titans last year. "Everybody forgets about them because they lost the Super Bowl," he said, "but here's a team that finished 8-8 the year before that was able to fight its way through a tough playoff schedule to get there."

Hmmm. The Raiders were 8-8 last year. Does Gruden feel pressure for his team to step up to that level, to at least get into the AFC Championship Game?

"There's pressure in everything," he said. "I feel pressure to make the right decision if my wife sends me to the store to get diapers. Ever since I've been here, people have talked about me being under pressure.

"We have to forget about that. We have to figure a way to put pressure on the other team."

And they'll do that when they develop that winning attitude. Sunday would be a good time to start.